Jos Schuurmans / josschuurmans.com

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Borrowing your brain, your skill, your network

What follows is a draft email message to people in my network. If we know each other, move me to your spam whitelist and expect to receive one of these 🙂

[STARTS]

Subject: Borrowing your brain, your skill, your network

Hi!

I’m on cloud nine at the moment because of the recognition I received from the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation’s ‘Uutisraivaaja‘ innovation competition for my idea of a personal news recommendation engine based on on-line social gestures.

257 entries where submitted to the competition. 10 ideas have been selected to the Finals. I will be given 10,000 euros to prepare a presentation of my innovation at the Finals on September 15.

Every gesture contributes to a collective human news filter. The aggregate data can be used to inform a personal news offering to individual users.

For every pair of users in the system, the engine will calculate the proximity of their past gestures.

If user A and user B have a high proximity of past gestures, the next gesture user A will express will be highly relevant to the engine’s recommendation of news and information to user B; and vice versa.

While I’m not yet entirely sure how to go about it, here are some initial thoughts:

Create an open source software project which may outlive the duration of the competition;

Establish a foundation to manage and support the project and safeguard its open source nature;

Engage a Chief Engineer;

Engage a Chief Designer;

Engage a Chief Evangelist;

Engage logistical and other support people;

Engage (international) news organizations to sponsor the project;

Engage non-commercial organizations in the realm of news and journalism;

Engage educational institutions;

Explore governmental, non-governmental and philantropical funding;

Explore venture capital funding;

Build the core technology;

Design a compelling web/mobile user interface;

Design a convincing demonstration of a common use case scenario;

Build a browser plug-in;

Launch a web service featuring personal news recommendations;

Initiate pilot projects with one or more news organizations;

Nurture users and developers;

Give sponsors, developers, and anyone else who adds value to the project due credit on the website and elsewhere.